Stuffed Cabbage Rolls With Meat and Rice – Malfouf Recipe

If you are a fan of stuffed grape leaves or Dolma, you ought try this stuffed cabbage rolls recipe. In Arabic it’s called “Malfouf” which has a dual meaning of “cabbage” as well as “rolled.” It’s also called “Mih-sheh Malfouf” which means stuffed cabbage.

Malfouf is a traditional Lebanese dish which involves rolling cabbage leaves with a stuffing of ground meat, rice, 7-spices (of course), then stacking them in a cooking pot in layers with garlic in between, and then simmering them on low heat in a sauce made with lemon juice, fried minced garlic, water and salt.

My mouth is watering as we speak 🙂 This recipe LOVES lemon juice, and I hope you get to use freshly squeezed lemons as they make a difference.

Other variations of this recipe in the traditional Lebanese cuisine can be made with Swiss chard leaves instead of cabbage, which would then be called “sleek mih-sheh” meaning “stuffed Chards.” But that’s for another time.

A 4 lbs cabbage head should yield around 30-35 rolled cabbage leaves depending on how big the leaves are.

Peel and discard the outer leaves of the cabbage.

Pit out the large stem from the bottom of the cabbage as in the photo above. This will help the leaves get separated easier.

To separate the leaves, simmer the entire cabbage head in a large pot of boiling water for 5-10 minutes while carefully turning it over to ensure exposure to all of its sides.

As the leaves loosen, pin down the cabbage inside the pot with one fork, and with another fork slowly peel away the leaves one after the other. Do this slowly and carefully so you don't hurt yourself with boiling water, and to also ensure that leaves are whole and not torn.

Place the cabbage leaves in a colander as you peel them. Please note that if you try to peel leaves of a raw cabbage they'll very likely break and tear.

Once you've separated all leaves, try to roll one or two of them to see if they are soft enough. If not, and if they tear or break, put them back in the boiling water pot and cook them for another 5 minutes.

Mix the ground beef with the rice, 1 to 2 teaspoons of Lebanese 7-spices (or Allspice) to taste as well as ½ teaspoon of salt to taste. Mix them well and set aside.

Lay each cabbage leaf separately on a cutting board, cut out the stem if it's too thick. Spread 1 to 2 table spoons of meat stuffing along the edge of the leaf , then roll it slowly and tightly over the meat all the way.

Line up the stuffed rolls carefully in a wide/deep cooking pot one by the other in a compact manner until you've completed a layer which you will garnish with a few chopped cloves of garlic. Place the rolls with the greenest leaves on the bottom of the pot since they need more heat/longer to cook.

Roll all the leaves and place them in the pot in this manner while placing garlic cloves in between the layers. You may end up with 2 to 4 layers of rolls, depending on how wide the cooking pot is.

In a frying pan, saute 10-15 cloves of freshly minced or crushed garlic (one head) with 3 table spoons of olive oil and a squeeze of lemon juice until they start to turn light brown then dump the entire content on top of the cooking pot.

Squeeze 4 lemons, mix them with 4 cups of water, and ½ to 1 teaspoon of salt (to taste), then add them to the cooking pot. The sauce should cover the rolls and if not, add more water until it does.

Carefully shake/tilt the cooking pot sideways a few times to ensure the sauce seeps through everywhere and that the fried garlic also mixes well with the sauce (or you can mix them in advance).

Place a heavy plate inside the pot, on top of the rolls, cover the pot, and turn on the stove on high heat for about 5-10 minutes until they boil, at which time you turn heat to very low and let them simmer slowly for 1 to 1.5 hours (until the cabbage is fully cooked and is no longer crunchy - time may vary, however you should be left with a bit of sauce on the bottom don't let it dry up).

Serve hot with an optional side of plain Greek yogurt and an optional squeeze of lemon juice.

Notes

Note: You may end up with tiny leaves that can't be rolled or with other fragments from the cabbage head. Don't throw them away. You can make a nice spicy saute of cabbage and onions called "Marshousheh" which is a Saute of Cabbage and Cracked Wheat.

I love Iranian and Afghani food, especially the latter. It is very flavorful, healthy and you're right it looks good. However I disagree that Arab food doesn't look appealing, especially Lebanese cuisine :-) When my mom cooks dinner for guests and fills the table with mezza (appetizer) and entrees nothing beats how beautiful and colorful it looks. In our recipes on this website however, we don't spend as much time as we should on decorating the food and prepping it well enough for the photo shoots...

I'm vegetarian too so I use Morning Star crumbles (soy "meat"). It works well.I'm a grandmother. I've been a vegetarian for 20 years, but was not so when I was raising my family.A while ago I invited my son to come to dinner. I served mehshee malfouf I had cooked with the Morning Star crumbles. He didn't know the difference. After dinner, when I told him, he jokingly said I had invited him to dinner "under false pretenses." We all had a good laugh at that.
In my meat cooking days, I had never used lamb the way my mother used to. I had substituted ground beef. The reason? I once had the opportunity to hold a lamb in person; the animal was so sweet I could not bear the thought of killing this baby animal just to eat it.

My aunt used to stuff cabbage and grape leaves with a chickpea, rice, chopped fresh parsley & mint, spices, lemon juice mixture instead of using mean. Lots of lemon juice and garlic with the allspice & cinnamon gave much flavor!

Found ur web sit wanting to double check my recollection of my mother inlaw making this ;)
It's my husbands favourite n it was a hit!!!
Thanku so much.
But I was wondering how it might freez, any heads up?

Hi Lori - a teaspoon of mint would be fine.. you want it to be a background flavor, kinda subtle. You can use any rice. We've done this with basmati, and all sorts of rice.. it doesn't matter. I like it best with Basmati rice.

There is no name given to the replies, so can't address.
I will try to find out the name of the cabbage commonly used in Lebanon. I'm sure it's available here. I used 'Green Cabbage' the last time. Maybe it's Savoy that should be used? Will do some homework.
@Amy - you never cook the meat or the rice before stuffing them.
Also be careful not to cook your cabbage for too long either as it will make them a bit sour and overcooked. It's trial and error. I learned a lot from my mistakes making them the first time. :)

Ok, I'm totally confused. I was told that you have to cook the rice and the meat before stuffing/rolling in the cabbage. I will make sure to get my csbbage really soft. Please let me know. Do we take the raw beef and uncooked rice. Thanks.

Hi Amy - I haven't heard of the style where the meat and rice are cooked prior to rolling them. The cabbage rolls end up being steamed on low heat for a long time which is plenty to cook any raw meat and rice. We always use raw meat and raw rice in the stuffing and they come out fully cooked and wonderful.

I used lamb mince instead of beef, because that's what I had.. and we are big lamb lovers here.. but have made it with beef.. both are good. I like to add dried chilli and a little marjoram to the stuffing mix for some extra flavour...
One thing I always struggle with though is that a lot of the cabbage leaves are so thick.. I had to boil them a long time to soften, and also couldn't use a lot of it... but still managed to make enough from the 1 cabbage to use up all the mixture.. it just worked out... even though I cut a fair bit off from the thicker leaves.
I wish I had grapes growing so I could have fresh leaves to make stuffed vine leaves (wara-aneb). I tried using packaged leaves and tinned leaves and they were terrible. :( We are interstate on a work contract for 2 years so renting.. but when we go back to our own home I'm going to plant some grapes!

Barbara I hear you about the cabbage leaves. There are different types of cabbage so next time around I'd say give it a shot with a new type and see if you can make it soften faster than the previous one. The cabbage type that is commonly available in Lebanon (don't know it's precise type/name really) softens up pretty quickly for some reason.

I made the cabbage rolls and they came out superb... I actually love them with extra lemon on top, and don't laugh, with tomato sauce also. :)
btw, have you ever tried making it without peeling the whole cloves of garlic that you put in the pot... you just pop them open in your mouth, flavour is intense/yummy. Next time I make this dish I'm going to add the fried crushed garlic at the end, after the cabbage rolls are cooked and have absorbed the water.. because the more you cook garlic the more it loses it's flavour.. I do this with anything I cook with garlic.. pasta sauce, cusa.. just throw in the crushed raw garlic (or in this case fried) right in the last few minutes of cooking. One thing I like about your recipe is that no butter was used. I've seen a lot of lebanese add butter to a lot of the dishes. I don't think it's necessary and turns a healthy dish into an unhealthy dish.

Hi Barbara thank you for your comments and i'm glad you liked the Cabbage rolls recipe. Regarding garlic, my grandma use to make it like you described with unpeeled garlic cloves. And very good idea about the timing to add garlic, this would indeed give it a more intense flavor. Excellent point.

I made the kibbeh recipe from this site yesterday and it was superb, so going to make the cabbage rolls. The recipes here are full of flavour.. lots of herbs and spices and the instructions are very clear.
One of the best recipe sites I've seen so have bookmarked it and will be using it a lot.

One of my favorite dishes!We call it Sarma. It's the winter version of the grape leaves sarma/dolma/: ). We use the leaves of sour cabbage which are soft already and easy to work with . For the staffing we put rice,meat cumin, chopped leeks,paprika and pepper and a lot of olive oil. Eating it with garlic bread is so yammmy

Hi, I really liked this recipe and looking forward to trying it out! However, i wanted to know, don't the cabbage leaves loosen once you've rolled the rice and meat into it? If they do, what can you do to keep it together?

Hi Sam You raise a good question. In order to make the rolled cabbage not loosen and fall apart, you can do two things: When you boil them at first, make sure they become very soft otherwise if they're not too soft they'll be more likely to loosen after rolling. The second thing is as soon as you roll them stack them side by side in the cooking pot this helps keeping them together. I hope you enjoy it and I look forward to learning how it goes.

We did the rolls again tonight, this time without infusing an entire lemon. I also added a lot more allspice than I did last time (I love the stuff, but have to be careful because my daughter is not a spice fan). They were a hit with the whole family.
We accompanied them with some fried, breaded mushrooms, a favourite in our home. Hope you don't mind me sharing my own recipe here: Cut some button mushrooms in half and shake in a lidded container of one egg and half a cup of milk. Then transfer to another container with breadcrumbs and salt and pepper. Shake until coated (if you use containers with lids; you won't have to worry about how to turn the tap on to clean your hands after), then deep fry in hot oil. Completely delicious as a side with many meals and as a mezza dish. I am not Lebanese, but my in-laws are and I have won them over with this one.

mushrooms dish sounds great.. I am going to try it also!
re: adding allspice.. not sure you're using the commonly used mixed spices that is used in Lebanese cooking to get it's traditional flavour.. it's normally either called 'mixed spice' or '7 spices'... if you don't have either then just adding cinnamon, groundcloves and a little nutmeg will do, as they are the primary spices in the mixed spice.. With cinnamon being the highest proportion. Allspice is used more for sweets and pickles.
Whenever I add the lebanese mixed spice (which I get from a middle eastern continental store) I always add marjoram and chilli powder. Not too make it hot but just to give it a little more lift/kick.

I've never been one to follow instructions too closely and so made this in my own slapdash way. I did the filling as per the recipe, but a much smaller portion as this was a test run. I did rip the cabbage leaves off the raw beast because I didn't want to use up a whole cabbage, but they were fine. I then par-boiled them to soften them.
Rolled the mixture into the leaves and placed in a deep pan on the stovetop. I added some beef stock and a whole lemon, cut into eighths, and simmered for about an hour.
Everything was cooked perfectly. The big mistake was the lemon. It was too much but thankkfully really only pickled the cabbage and not the filling.
I will be doing this again soon and will experiment a bit further.

Nice experimentation there Lee.. :-) I haven't tried it with beef stock added to the cooking pot, will do that one day it sounds as if it'd go very well with it. Some other "stuffed" leaves recipes include putting pieces of lamb meet along with their fat in between the layers of rolls...

Also I think it's worth doing to cut the leaves off and boil them separately, but I would do it in 2 batches.. the outer half as they are thinner and then remove from water and then throw in the inner leaves as they are thicker and will need a longer boiling time.

I grew up eating a variation of this dish. The rolls themselves sound very similar but ours are baked in a tomato based sauce. One of my favorites! The microwave is a good shortcut for preparing the cabbage. Core it as you normally would and just pop it in the microwave for a few minutes. The leaves peel away with no effort and less mess! You may have to repeat as you get a few layers in.

If you find trying to roll the cabbage a problem I suggest making it a"Hot Dish". Use all the same ingredients but cut up the cabbage mix all together and bake in the oven. Tastes the same and solves the problem about cabbage being to tough.

In our family we call this yebreck. I don't know where that name came from! Something obviously got lost in translation. We flavor the meat with cinnamon, salt and pepper, no garlic. We layer the cabbage rolls in the pot with lamb shanks or shoulder blade for added flavor. Lots of lemon! It was always served with garlic french bread (there's the garlic!) and fruit salad. Love it! It's even better the second day.Here's a tip for the cabbage. Core the head, then freeze it overnight. Once it is thawed the leaves are soft and pliable, and I think they stay sweeter than when you boil them. Plus, no burned fingers!

Ah.. Yebreck. My later grandmother who was from Douma, Lebanon, used to call the stuffed grape leaves as Yebreck. The name sounds Turkish to me but it's interesting how different dishes are called by the same name.

Miriam you're so right about this. That is why we have to boil the cabbage head a lot in order to make the leaves loosen. And as it's rolled and put on the stove, it takes 1.5 hours to cook. In Lebanon it would have taken 1 hour or less because the cabbage there is softer.

I love these dolmas. They're all mouth- watering.
We have similar dolmas smaller than these and also we don't add sauce, made with lemon juice and fried garlic.I'll try it next time.
You can see similar cabbage dolmas on TuzEkmek; http://www.tuzekmek.com/etli-lahana-dolmasi-cankiri-usulu/